From dorm room cold calls to $10M a year

I generate $10 million a year from recurring fee revenue, but my start in the investment business was spartan: From the cozy confines of my college dorm room, I cold-called people out of a phone book.

I generate $10 million a year from recurring fee revenue, but my start in the investment business was spartan: From the cozy confines of my college dorm room, I cold-called people out of a phone book. In a two-part series, I will show you how I built my practice, and how you can become a multimillion-dollar producer.

Today there are more opportunities in the financial services industry than any of us can possibly act upon. The key is to focus on the right opportunity and not get distracted.

Too often, advisers have difficulty focusing and seeing ideas through to completion, because as entrepreneurs, we rarely meet an idea that we don’t love. We will get started down a road, run into resistance and quit.

We start over just when the rewards of continuing are the greatest and the costs of stopping are the highest. So the question remains: what separates those advisers who break through and take their business to the next level from those advisers who stay stuck in neutral?

It boils down to developing a strong, passionate, meaningful “why” statement. With a strong why, anything is possible, because it allows us to tap into the most powerful super-human resource, the subconscious mind, or “subcon,” as I refer to it. Experts say that whereas the conscious mind can process between five and nine bits of information per second, the subcon can process 11 million.

So how do we tap into subcon and unlock this powerful, hidden treasure? All you have to do is implement the following four steps and you’ll grow from mediocrity into a top achiever.

Step One is to complete the blueprinting process, allowing you to live your life by design, not by default. It will help ignite your burning desire to succeed, and it will lead to personal fulfillment. But, let me warn you, it won’t be is easy.

The process consists of the following five exercises, and you can download the entire package for free at truewealthcommunity.com.

Clarify your values: All people have certain principles and values they believe in and live by. Having strong convictions about the values we base our lives on, and keeping them front and center, lets us stay balanced and focused on what is most important.

Uncover your purpose: What moves you beyond the day-to-day pursuits of life? What causes you to jump out of bed in the morning feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the day’s challenges? What is something larger than yourself that moves you? Knowing your reason for being helps you live your life with purpose.

Develop a compelling vision for your future: Always remember the adage, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. Unfortunately, that’s a recipe for mediocrity. People of great achievement know exactly where they’re going, and they take the necessary steps to get there. This is the dream life and dream business you would create if you had no constraints, if you could wave a magic wand and make it happen.

Develop personal mission and business statements. A mission statement is not a hokey statement that gets written once and is then filed away. Rather, it is a living, breathing document that should be displayed prominently for visual reinforcement and should be internalized to keep your subcon working on it.

Set specific, measurable, achievable and compatible goals: They need to be based on achieving something that is meaningful to you. As you set goals, set them so that you believe in your heart of hearts that there’s a fifty-fifty chance of achieving them. That way you will succeed at about an 80% rate. If you’re not coming close to 80%, you are not believing in your goals. If you achieve 90% to 100% of your goals, you’re not stretching far enough.

Laminate your goals and look at them every day. I hang them in my shower and call them my “shower power.” There are times I’m working out or in the shower, when I’m relaxed and not pushing, that something magical happens.

My subcon comes to the forefront, and I’ll grab my phone and dictate a message using Copytalk. It is not uncommon for me during a one-hour workout to end up with four to six different ideas relating to the goals that I had just read. Sometimes I will hop out of the shower because I am so excited about an idea.

In two weeks, we’ll talk about the remaining three keys. Between now and then, please download and start working on the blueprinting process by visiting www.truewealthcommunity.com.

Ron Carson is president of both Carson Wealth Management Group and PEAK, a financial adviser coaching, software and training organization. Both companies are in Omaha, Neb.